YSM Issue 87.4

The take-home message: “Eat more fruits and vegetables!”
fruit and vegetable ingestion. The explanation
for this observation is very simple: blood is a
transport medium and so changes with daily
diet fluctuations. In contrast, skin is a storage
medium, so carotenoids are more likely to
reflect a person’s usual intake.
These results are only the most recent
developments among years of research that
Cartmel and Mayne have carried out in this
area. In 2010, they established that the skin
test was as reliable, if not more reliable, an
indicator for carotenoid levels as the blood
test in the absence of dietary intervention.
This laid the groundwork for their 2012
study that showed that a correlation between
skin carotenoid levels and fruit and vegetable
intake also exists in preschool-age children.
IMAGE COURTESY OF TOP-NEWS.IN
drugs, disease treatment, and intensive
care, while there is far less emphasis on
disease prevention, nutrition therapy,
and lifestyle medicine. Part of the
reason that nutrition therapy has been
pushed to the sidelines by the medical
establishment is that tracking nutrition
and dietary habits is so challenging
for both physicians and patients. “We
can use this as a method of assessing
the success of an intervention. For
the most part, people have used
self-report, but this is a much more
objective measure,” Cartmel says.
Personalized medicine has been
emerging as one of the hottest areas in
medicine, and Cartmel’s findings will
nutrition
FOCUS
contribute to this field by enabling personalized
feedback from doctors. “You could say [to
patients], ‘Look, your skin carotenoid levels
have increased. You’ve done a great job with
your diet.’ It could be a way to provide positive
feedback,” Cartmel says.
At the most fundamental level, there is one
message that Cartmel says she wants to convey
to people after seeing the results of this study:
“Eat more vegetables and fruits!” The repeatedly
proven health benefits of vegetables and fruits
coupled together with this new objective and
reliable measure of vegetable and fruit intake
have made following a healthy diet easier than
ever.
Physicians also now have a foolproof,
objective way of finding out what patients are
eating or not eating. So watch out: it’s time to
eat up or fess up.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BRENDA CARTMEL
The original laser used for Raman Resonance
Spectroscopy in Cartmel and Mayne’s 2010 study
to validate the reliability of skin tests.
Only the Beginning
From here, Cartmel hopes to test the
carotenoid-measuring procedure in various
ethnic groups. Her recent study was
conducted only on Caucasian subjects,
and people of other ethnicities differ from
Caucasians in the levels of a pigment called
melanin in their skin. Because the test
examines pigments in skin, varying levels of
melanin could affect the outcomes for nonwhite
people.
In addition to providing both doctors
and patients with an improved method
of tracking fruit and vegetable intake, the
results of this study have much broader
implications.
In the U.S. healthcare system, an
overwhelming amount of attention is given to
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEVIN WANG
KEVIN WANG is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles. He is a prospective Molecular,
Cellular, and Developmental Biology major and the current copy editor of
the Yale Scientific Magazine. He has been writing for the magazine since his
freshman year.
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Dr. Cartmel and Ms. Harrigan for
their time, enthusiasm, and generosity.
FURTHER READING
Mayne, Susan T. et al. “Resonance Raman spectroscopic evaluation of skin
carotenoids as a biomarker of carotenoid status for human studies.” Archives
of Biochemistry and Biophysics 539, no. 2 (2013): 163-170.
www.yalescientific.org
October 2014
Yale Scientific Magazine
17